Meet Higher Ground: Our story in Tucson & Chandler
You’ve probably heard of us in passing, seen our van out and about, met us at an event, or talked to our team at one of the 8 Restart SMART sites that we operate at the following schools:
Apollo Middle School (Tucson, AZ)
Doolen Middle School (Tucson, AZ)
Grijalva Elementary (Tucson, AZ)
Lawrence 3-8 (Tucson, AZ)
Safford PreK-8 (Tucson, AZ)
Southside Charter School (Tucson, AZ)
Utterback Middle School (Tucson, AZ)
Willis Jr. High School (Chandler, AZ)
So what’s Higher Ground’s story, and how can you be a part of it?
Allow us to take a minute of reading time to share!
What we do
In a nutshell, we are a nonprofit focused on improving Arizona’s K-12 education system to improve outcomes for youth and families. Our home base is Tuscon–It’s the community that our team calls home. Additionally, we offer services at one location in Chandler.
Our team is diverse. Our commitment to improving outcomes for kids and families brings us together. You can think of us as a collage of different skills and perspectives. We are:
Former teachers
Educational administrators
Graduate students in education
After-school and in-school care providers
Parents of kids
Higher schoolers (interns and part-time employees who are learning specific skills in the business world!)
Business owners with deep community ties
We are working together to (1) help our schools be more effective with their existing resources and (2) better prepare kids for the realities of our modern world.
That means providing direct aid to teachers in classrooms at the 8 locations we listed above, providing direct aid to families navigating trauma as a result of intergenerational poverty, and helping families build interventions for kids who are dealing with life situations that no child should ever experience.
We believe it takes a community for kids in any life scenario to reach their best outcomes in life.
Why we do it
Our mission is to empower one life at a time to reach, transform, and elevate the community through love and character-building.
Achieving this goal means that we need more equitable education systems. Kids born into conditions of poverty, through no choice of their own, face an uphill battle from the moment of their first breath. And it’s not exactly easy for them and their parents to ask for help.
In Arizona, the poverty rate for kids under 18 was 15% at the time that it was last measured by the American Community Survey in 2022.
Often, it’s up to these kids to figure out their own solutions — sometimes while not having enough to eat, money to buy clothes or school supplies, or support from family for homework help. In these conditions of insecurity, people can turn to violence, crime, and drugs, or other behaviors that do not support their goals.
If you fall into this group, know you’re not alone. It’s not just you. It’s not a moral failing on your part.
At Higher Ground, we reinforce this message. We create conditions for kids, families, and communities to empower and uplift themselves.
Our model
Big picture
Right now, there’s a meaningful innovation happening in the field of education. It’s well-known among policymakers, parents, educators — and even kids themselves — that school systems need rethinking.
There are several reasons why, but at the simplest level, our society has changed. Consider how much technology has evolved in the last 20 years, as an example — and the role of that tech, both positive and negative, in our kids’ lives.
Beyond what we do understand, there’s also a lot that we don’t. From social media algorithms and AI, our kids are in an entirely different ‘mental world’ than we were at their age.
Are Arizona’s kids being raised with the skills that our society is going to need? Is our society giving our kids what they need?
The COVID-19 pandemic brought this question to the forefront of our minds. Statewide in Arizona, nationally, and internationally, inequalities bubbled up to the point where it was impossible to ignore. That’s why institutions like Brookings are calling for innovation in our education. Core pillars include:
Education is a human right and public good
Access is not tantamount to learning
Academic learning is just one dimension of holistic student development
In its research, Brookings elaborates that the COVID-19 crisis accelerated the need to focus on more than academic growth when considering a child’s well-being. Specifically, solving the problem will “require developing creative new ways to draw local education professionals, parents, community members, and students into cross-national learning opportunities that create new possibilities, build their knowledge and capabilities, and fuel their agency.”
According to Brookings, the solution comes from developing creative new ways to draw local education professionals, parents, and community members into the process. As the saying goes, success takes a village.
Closing the opportunity gaps
Let’s reframe our relationship with the phrase “problem behaviors.”
A child demonstrating trauma symptoms is not a problem. A family having trouble putting food on the table is not the problem. A child who wants to quit an addictive substance but lacks the tools to do so is not the problem.
The problem is the lack of support.
The lack of support for individuals facing poverty, opportunity gaps, and policies that have affected families for generations.
Support requires infrastructure.
At Higher Ground, we’re building infrastructure to support our community’s most vulnerable. That’s the essence of our Restart SMART Strategy.
What we’re doing is adapting a well-researched operating framework called Community Schools and implementing it in neighborhoods that need our support most. The Community Schools framework is one toolkit that translates the vision in the Brookings study that we described in the previous section.
Community Schools aren’t a new concept. There are approximately 5,000 community schools across the United States. Each one is different, tailored to its unique neighborhood. The idea is that schools become hubs to offer services to the community. Completing the cycle, the community supports the school by providing services that impact wellbeing and learning outcomes.
Restart SMART is unique. Our strategy focuses on youth, family, and teacher support. Sometimes, a child needs more attention than a teacher is able to provide. In those situations, the child can go to the Restart SMART room to decompress, talk to a caring adult, take quiet time, or ask for help. Using our Data-Powered Strategic Coaching Technology, Support Specialists and Site Directors focus on student, family, and community well-being according to that person’s specific history. Knowing that each person is the expert in their own life, this strategy empowers students, families, schools, and communities toward making sustainable change.
Through our Restart SMART centers, we also connect families to resources in our community. These include pathways to shelter, food, clothing, healthcare access, and other life-critical services.
Measuring outcomes
Higher Ground and Restart SMART are one piece of a bigger puzzle. We are at the beginning of our journey. What’s measurable right now are signals. Here’s what we’re monitoring at the school level.
Improvements to School Letter Grades
Improved school attendance
Improvement in wellness, resilience, and self-control
Reduction in chronically absent students
Decrease in disciplinary incidents
We are routinely monitoring both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Building an effective measurement system requires expertise, structure, and resource access. Higher Ground is building privacy-led and ethical pathways to connect Restart SMART to the quantitative measurement of our mission, to empower one life at a time to reach, transform, and elevate the community through love and character-building.
Ultimately, we’re successful when youth, teachers, and families tell us that we’re meeting their needs and making their educational experiences better–when we hear and see that educational and life outcomes are improving for our youth and families. Our communities are our constituents and stakeholders.
How you can help
Supporting our community also means that we need support from our community. That’s the nature of community — it’s inextricably linked.
We welcome you to be a part of what we are building. We welcome anyone who feels drawn to connecting with us. Specifically, we are seeking the following:
Fundraising support
We rely on donations and grants to provide services and maintain our operations. Funds go directly to our operations. We are currently seeking contributions from the following sources:
Institutional funding. We are seeking introductions to foundations, corporate-run philanthropies, and other entities that may be a good fit to fund our mission.
Major giving initiatives. We are looking to connect with businesses in and outside of Arizona that may be interested in making a charitable contribution through their major-giving program.
Donations. Any amount helps. We rely on donations of all sizes. Even a small amount can help with expenses for classrooms and services.
Your donations are tax-deductible, and we’d be happy to work with you to meet your goals. If you’re aware of a funding source that may be a good fit for Higher Ground, please let us know — or send donors our way!
Human collaboration
If you cannot contribute financially and want to be involved, welcome! While we need money to operate, it’s not what motivates us, ultimately. Human collaboration is the driving force of our mission, and we are open to your ideas. Tell us how you’d like to be a part of what we’re building. Here are some suggestions:
Subscribe to and share our blog content. We routinely publish content on our blog focused on education innovation. Our editorial goal is to create a magazine-like digital experience where people in our community are all learning (and evolving in our thinking), together. By subscribing, you’ll stay up to date on our messaging. It also helps us out when you share it. Scroll down to the section titled “stay updated” if you’d like to hear from us.
Build an organizational alliance with us. We are open to connections with local nonprofits and organizations with which we can partner to deliver resources to families who need direct material support. We are also open to ideas for partnerships that we may not have considered! Tell us what you’re thinking.
Volunteer or intern with us. Careers are a powerful part of the human experience, and we value that you are willing to invest time with us. Specifically, we are seeking individuals who may want to help with community-building, who wish to gain relevant experiences (i.e. digital media, marketing), and who are curious about ways that our education system can better integrate with our communities, overall.
Contact info@higherground.me to help reach, transform, and elevate communities across Southern Arizona.